By Ralph Marston
It's so enticing, the thought of taking your network marketing opportunity online. There are millions of people out there in the online community, and it is so quick and easy and inexpensive to connect with them. But nothing is as easy as it sounds at first, and online marketing is no exception.
If you're expecting to get rich overnight by marketing online, you'll be disappointed. There are two basic ways to market online. One of them works far better than the other.
The first way is to treat the online enviornment as one big mass market. Go for exposure. Get your name and your commercial message out to as many people as you can, in any way you can. Send the same message to everybody. Have a standardized set of promotional materials ready to go for anyone who requests information. There are many problems with this approach. First, it could get you in big trouble. There are rules and standards online, and if you violate them consistently you've got problems. Problems ranging from extremely bad karma to termination of your account. Another problem: there are thousands of other people doing the same thing that you're doing, and you soon tend to get lost in all the noise. I must see 10-15 commercial presentations every day in my email. Usually I don't even look at them. It will take a lot more than MAKE.MONEY.FAST to catch my attention. In my opinion, ad blasts are a waste of time and bandwidth.
One of the best ways to work the mass marketing approach is ads on the commercial services such as Compuserve, America On Line and Prodigy. People don't look at them unless they intend to read ads. They are not intrusive like unsolicited email or posting on non-commercial newsgroups. The ads that work best are short and well-written to get people's interest and make them want to get more information. And the ads usually work better, the longer they run. The key with using ads is to make your information available in small doses. Write a short ad, and then follow up to responses with a general description of what you're offering. Avoid the temptation to send all your information at once. First of all, it probably won't get read. People tend to just ignore anything that is very long. Sending your information in short pieces also helps you to establish a relationship with your prospect -- and that is a key point.
One big problem with ads: most of the people who read them are also running ads themselves. Think about the implications of that when it comes to building a large, duplicating downline.
The second, and better, way to market online is to use the online environment to develop relationships. Not commercial relationships, but personal relationships. This is something that is easy to do with email. There's every subject imaginable being discussed on the 'net. And then you always have the subject of the Internet itself which most people online are willing to discuss with you.
When you develop a relationship with someone, they will eventually want to know about what you do. And then you can tell them, as a friend, about your products or opportunity. And here again, don't "hose them down" with everything all at once. Let them pull the information out of you. This is an approach that I've been using lately with a lot of success, both online and off. Make people take it from you.
For example, I was in someone's office the other day -- a young woman I hadn't seen in a while. It was a wonderfully beautiful spring afternoon and there were 3 or 4 people in the office complaining that the dry, sunny weather was giving them terrible allergy problems. I listened sympathetically to each one relate their own particular woes. Then I said, with all the empathy I could muster, "Yeah, I know. I used to have that problem, too. I'd get this terrible headache every afternoon right between my eyes."
This simple statement created what I call an information vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if there's any way it can be done, the vacuum will be filled. There was nothing this person could possibly do other than ask me, "Well, what did you do to get rid of the problem?"
My answer: "I started using a really good nutritional supplement about two years ago. The first year my allergies didn't bother me nearly as much, and this year I haven't had any problem at all."
Another information vacuum. The next question has to be, "What's it called?"
You get the idea.
The important thing here is not what I said. It's what I didn't say. If I had hosed her down with a 15 minute explanation without even stopping to catch my breath (and I've done it, believe me, it's an urge that I have to struggle to keep under control), then her eyes would have glazed over and when I was finished she would have just said "Oh." Then she would have promptly forgotten about it.
You can use the same approach online. I've recently been putting together a standardized set of answers to frequently asked questions about my products and opportunity. Now I don't send out the whole thing to anyone. But when I get a question, I can quickly and easily respond to just that question. Having them all written out ahead of time helps me resist the temptation to go into a lengthy explanation of the whole company just to answer a simple question. It helps me to develop the attitude of -- if they want to know anything else, they'll ask. Now of course I do volunteer a little extra in each answer. I've tried to make it just enough to whet their appetite, but not to confuse them or overwhelm them. As an added benefit, writing out these questions and answers helps me to focus better on what I need to be saying, not only online, but on the phone and in person as well. It provides me with short, effective "scripts" that I can call upon as needed. Another advantage -- these "scripts" can be passed along to my downline, whether they're online or not.
And that's the key to successfully marketing your opportunity online -- make sure whatever you do can be duplicated both online and off. This will ensure that you get the exponential growth that is such an important factor in network marketing.
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